Amazon has partially restored its services but is still grappling with the data center woes, which surfaced early this week. The glitch
started at the company's Northern Virginia data center. The glitch took down various popular websites and services including FourSquare, Quora and Reddit. Amazon reported that its Data Center is facing latency problems and connection issues which compromised its performance. Though, most of the services and websites are back on, but the incident has raised serious issues regarding the future of Public Cloud Computing.
Around Five years back, Amazon started its public cloud services, where is lent out its server space to outside companies. Since then, the business had been thriving for Amazon and it has plenty of corporate clients ranging from industry bigwigs like Netflix to hot startups like FourSquare. Not only that, but the business's success led to an increased interest in cloud computing and now many big tech companies have entered the fray.
So far, Cloud Computing had been praised for its virtues. With public cloud computing, small (or big) companies do not need to worry about maintaining their own data centers and they can simply outsource the task to cloud company. But Amazon's data center failure has again put the spotlight on oft-debated question of efficiency and security proposition of using a third party storage system. The user companies, especially the smaller ones, now need to ask themselves whether the trade off is worth it. This question is especially important for the companies which do not back up their data on multiple servers at different places.
This week had been especially bad for the data centers. Apart from Amazon outage, these massive data centers have also been panned by Greenpeace for their enormous appetite for energy. Greenpeace also slammed the data centers for relying on dirty sources of energy like coal. Cloud computing and massive data centers are fast becoming mainstream, however, to make them truly acceptable to all and sundry, the cloud computing pioneer need to work towards solving these issues. It also raises the question that if corporate clients are not safe depositing their data in public digital vault, then how safe is it for common retail consumers?